by Peter Murphy
Her face looked like it might crack into a hundred pieces.
‘I saved my money until I had my fare home. When I arrived back, the door was shut in my face. Here I was showing up large after not sending word in months. I was afraid. I didn’t know the first thing about childbearing. So I took a job as a maid in the hotel near the strand. That’s where I met Phyllis Nagle. She was a quare old bird, but she was the only one who’d help me. I told her the fix I was in and she said she wouldn’t see me stuck and found a caravan for me to rent. I worked until I was too far along to work any more. And when the time came, I had you. You were the savings of me.’
She stubbed out her cigarette and nodded, as if agreeing with herself.
‘When you have a child, John, something changes in you. You’re never free of worry. But you’re never lonely neither.’
By now it was dark outside. The moon was huge and red. I drained my glass.
‘Why are you telling me all this now?’
She pulled her cardigan tight.
‘Because you’re old enough. And because none of us know how much time is left.’
She poured us both another shot.
‘When you get to my age, you have no more use for secrets.’
***
I reeled out into the night, Powers bottle in my hand, the old hymn burning in my mind and the road lurching like a funhouse floor. As soon as my mother had gone to bed I’d rung Jamey’s house.
‘What’s up?’ he said.
‘Too wired to sleep. You around?’
He told me to meet him on the road into the village. He sounded drunk. Which made two of us.
Now it was way past midnight, maybe going on for two o’clock. As I walked, I sang what I could remember of my mother’s song to keep from getting spooked. The full moon burned inside its field of weirdly hued concentric rings, suspended like a huge balloon tethered to the chapel spire. The light it cast was bright enough for me to see Jamey coming from half a mile away. He was carrying a sports bag. We halted yards from each other, like duellists about to draw.
Jamey’s clothes were rumpled and his hair was out of control.
‘You look destroyed,’ I said. ‘Where’ve you been?’
The expression on his face was close to sheepish.
‘I was trying to keep up with Gunter.’
Being able to hold his drink was a point of honour with Jamey. He rubbed his hollow cheeks and shook his head.
‘I heard some stuff, man,’ he said. ‘Scary. Think I’m out of my depth with those boys.’
‘What kind of stuff?’
‘You’d be better off not knowing.’
I took a slug of whiskey and offered Jamey some.
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Where’d you get that?’
‘My mother.’
‘Your mother is a great woman.’
He took a mouthful, raised the bottle in a toast and handed it back, then unzipped the sports bag and pulled out a battered-looking camcorder.
‘Found this in the Superstores.’ He fiddled with the lens cap. ‘Secondhand, but it works.’ He put the camera to his eye, panning over the fields. It felt like we were the first colonisers of some remote, lonely planet.
‘Let’s walk,’ he said. ‘I want to shoot some stuff for my film.’
Now he was a filmmaker.
‘It’ll be a whatchamacallit,’ he said. ‘A bio-pic. You can play Verlaine. I’ll be Rimbaud. We’ll call it Merde à Dieu.’
We wandered the outskirts of Kilcody for ages, Jamey filming anything he found interesting, which was everything, and when our feet got sore we stopped for a smoke, passing the whiskey back and forth until it was gone. The moonlight was so strong it felt like a tractor beam that might suck us right up off the earth. I stepped into the gripe to fling the empty bottle over a ditch and in the process got something on my runners. I stood stork-like on the road and hopped a bit. My laces were stained with grass juice. A tapioca-like substance was smeared all over the patterned rubber soles.
‘Cow shit?’ Jamey said.
‘Frogspawn.’
I scraped it off on the grass, struggling to keep my balance. I’d never been so drunk. We shambled towards the village.
‘What now?’ I said when we reached the square.
‘We could go back to my place,’ Jamey said. ‘Free house.’
I pointed towards the chapel.
‘Or we could shoot some interiors.’ The words felt strange in my mouth. I had to concentrate to make them come out the right shape. ‘You can’t have a film called Merde á Dieu without any Jesus action in it.’
I began to cross the square. Jamey trotted after me.
‘Hang on,’ he called out. I ignored him and grabbed the wrought iron bars of the chapel gates and pulled myself up and over. He peered through the bars as I clapped flecks of rusty paint from my hands.
‘How we gonna get inside?’ he said.
‘We’ll jimmy the lock or something.’ It suddenly seemed important. ‘Trust me.’
The way Jamey was staring, I could see my face reflected in his irises, just as his must have been reflected in mine, mirrored eyes replicating images of each other off into for ever.
Jesus don’t show me your nightmare, I’ll show you mine.
The chapel’s mouth opens and the darkness sucks me in. My bare feet leave heat imprints on the cold flagstones. The faintest sounds are amplified and echo in the vaulted roof. Stone saints turn their heads, moonlight streams through the stained-glass windows.
This dark crypt is infested with musty shadows and trapped whispers. Hairs grow from the sweating walls, and the holy water font bubbles over, beads of mercury slithering across the floor. I approach the altar, footfall over footfall, echo upon echo. The Stations of the Cross unfold on either side like fourteen frames of a strange snuff film.
I pause at the altar railings and lift my head
Under the INRI, Christ slumps from the cross, head turned away as if trying to avoid the kiss of a stalker-fan. The emaciated body of a supermodel, luminous in the stained-glass light.
Or lack of it.
The silence makes me gag.
Put your hand against my chest, feel the smell fill my lungs like flu. It’s everywhere. This incense sleeps against the church rafters like gas. You can taste the rising damp, smell the must, feel the chill, see the mist, hear the trickle-down drip-drip-drip. Something worse than incense fills my nose and mouth and I breathe it in and the chapelhisses with gas-leak whispers. The stink grows thick, burns my throat.
(Lord I am not worthy to receive you.)
Christ’s eyes glow red and bore through me.
(Father, forgive me.)
Merde à Dieu
(Where are you?)
Eloi, eloi sabacthani.
(Cá? Caá?)
Have I offended thee?
A finger against his lips.
Shhh.
See no, hear no, speak no evil.
(Bless me father for I have sinned. It’s been a lifetime since my last confession.)
And now the chapel bell sounds, the sacred heart burns, God is on his throne and the world is doomed. Angels hold the four winds back. The tabernacle has been forced. The apocalypse is out. The seventh seal is open, and for half an hour all heaven is in silence.
The smell rises up, curdling the water in my mouth, the bland wafer taste on my tongue. And my prints are all over the place, a genetic stain, a confession that cant be retracted.
Pain spears my stomach. Bile rises up my neck. Clothing falls away in tattered scraps and I am naked.
Noise erupts.
The roof caves in.
Stars go out.
Rain pours down and puddles in the hollows of the broken floor, rises, spreads, the floor bows under the water’sweight. It gets cold so fast, the water freezes.
Under the ice, faces.
My face.
I turn to run.
My feet melt the ice; tongues lick my feet.
The ice c
racks, the floor gives way and I fall into a pit of mouths.
And fall and keep on falling through the mouths, through the tongues.
I hit the floor.
The floor gives way.
I fall some more.
I hit the bottom, a broken puppet in an open coffin.
The lid slams shut and I’m trapped in a lead-lined box, blind, deaf and dumb, a limbless thing whose mind whirls in circles, devouring its own reason. Worms gnaw through the wood, mute heads burrowing. They can’t hear, but their wormskin feels me breathing.
I breathe the smell.
Is this the blood of the lamb on my tongue?
Or the devil’s excrement on my hands?
VI
The telephone’s ringing shrilled through the house and corkscrewed into my sleep. I tried to open my eyes but they were all gummed up. I blinked until the blur cleared. Cruel sunlight made me squint.
‘Ma?’
No answer.
I pulled on my jeans and hurried downstairs, lifted the receiver from its cradle.
‘Hello.’
My voice was raspy from smoke and drink. I’d moved too suddenly: my stomach growled.
Jamey’s voice grated through the receiver: ‘What in the hell got into you?’
He sounded angry. Not just angry. Scared.
‘What—’
Dry mouth. My tongue was swollen. It hurt to swallow.
‘You went berserk,’ he said. ‘In the church. What’s wrong with you, man?’
His voice was so loud I had to hold the phone away from my ear for a second. I felt dizzy.
‘Is this a joke?’
‘No, it’s not a joke. We fucked up. Badly.’
Everything was way too bright.
‘Jamey, tell me what happened. I think I blacked out.’
‘Oh for god’s sake.’
He sighed. It came out as static.
‘Look, you flipped.’
He spoke slowly, as though explaining something to a child.
‘You started breaking stuff...’
Fragments of dream and memory began to detach themselves from the murk and float to the surface, horrible as jumbled bits of bodies.
‘...I had to drag you out of there. You took off like a loon.’
I put my head against the wall, a horrible hot-cold sweat breaking from my pores. I breathed in and out, trying to expel all the hot, sickly air from my stomach. Far away, Jamey’s voice squawked and crackled but I couldn’t make out the words.
There was a knock on the door.
‘I feel sick,’ I mumbled. ‘I have to go.’
The phone fell off the cradle and dangled from its cord. Another knock. The walls seemed to tilt as I felt my way to the door. Through frosted glass, the silhouette of a man. I twisted the latch. Guard Canavan stood before me on the step. Older than I remembered, starting to grey.
‘John Devine?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
The squad car was parked at our gate. He looked me up and down.
‘Get dressed.’
‘Where we going?’
His eyes were hard as stones.
‘The barracks.’
There were two of them, Guard Canavan and a plain-clothes man. They questioned me for ages, but all I could focus on was a bluebottle circling the light bulb, buzzing like a tiny chainsaw. No windows in the room, just a table and a couple of hard chairs. On the floor was a VCR player rigged up to a portable television set. Wires everywhere. It was unbearably humid; the place stank of white-scared sweat.
The plainclothes man sat on the table, a notepad flipped open. Every question I answered—who am I, where do I live, where was I last night—he wrote something. Every question I asked, he ignored. The bluebottle buzzed. The room stank. Guard Canavan stood at my shoulder; I had to twist in my chair to see his face.
‘We want to show you something,’ the plainclothes man said, and pressed a button on the VCR. Canavan moved to the wall and flicked off the light switch. The bluebottle went quiet. The television screen flickered, casting chiaroscuro shadows across the floor, the silence shattered by a blast of white noise.
A stream of blurry images filled the screen. Camcorder capture, jerky and hand-held. A queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, a stone hitting water, sinking down into my bowels. My shoulders knotted as the lens sharpened and the images came into focus. Close up: a page ripped from a notebook, biro scrawled in a ragged hand.
Merde à Dieu.
The title card.
‘Recognise the writing?’ Canavan said.
The camera panned to the tabernacle, zoomed into Jesus on the cross, and then a jarring cut to a perfect circle of white. The Eucharist. The camera pulled back. Communion wafers were strewn about the carpeted floor of the altar. A face filled the screen, curtained by hair. The plainclothes man paused the tape. It was my face, frozen under glass. Superimposed upon it, my reflection, staring from across the room. Canavan spoke into my ear, so close I could smell smoke and mouthwash.
‘Who was holding the camera?’
I looked at the floor. My runners were still stained with grass juice.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You know. And unless you tell me, I’m going to charge you right this minute.’
‘With what?’
‘You want me to draw you a picture?’
‘No, I just want to know what you’re accusing me of.’
Canavan nodded.
‘All right. The front door of the chapel was forced. One of the statues was toppled and smashed in bits. The tabernacle was driven in with one of those big brass candle-holders. There was Holy Communion thrown around everywhere. The chalice is still missing. And there was excrement on the altar. Faeces. Somebody used the place for a toilet, John.’
He was lying about the last part. Had to be.
‘What kind of cur do you think would do that?’ he said.
The plainclothes man stood and stretched.
‘We should show him the rest,’ he said. ‘Maybe that’ll jog his memory.’
They played the tape. I saw the shape of my body in the murk, facing the cross, a shadow speared by diagonal shafts of moonlight streaming through the stained glass, and just for a second I saw my whole shape change, become something else, something bestial, a goat if a goat could stand on its hind legs, something with long twisted nails and hair down its back and hoofs for feet and it howled, the sound so loud it overloaded the camcorder’s microphone and then the camera whipped away and all you could see was blackness, all you could hear was my voice, the sound torn from my throat, inchoate, violently distorted.
My fingers clawed at my jeans. I remembered the speech Canavan gave to our class when I was small, a ridiculous speech about what happened to bad boys and girls who went to hell, and it struck me that he was a religious man, and that chilled my heart. A small voice inside me started babbling an act of contrition, but all it could remember was the first line and the rest came out garbled.
I looked from Canavan to the plainclothes man, but they seemed not to have seen what I’d seen on the tape. Stuff came up my neck; I cupped a hand to my mouth. Canavan lunged for my arm and pulled me out of the room and down a hall and into another room with a toilet and a washbasin. I hung my head over the toilet bowl but nothing came up, so I stuck my fingers down my throat and dry-heaved until my stomach hurt. Spat. Rinsed my mouth with water from the tap. Looked in the mirror. My eyes were like burn holes in a sheet.
Canavan leaned against the door, arms folded.
‘What were you on?’
‘Huh?’
‘You were on something. What was it?’
‘I wasn’t on anything.’
‘That’s not what it looked like.’
‘Swear to god.’
‘We can do tests. It’ll still be in your bloodstream.’
‘Do all the tests you want.’
‘Someone put you up to this, didn’t they? Whoever was holding the camera. And I’
ve a pretty good idea who it was.’
He cleared his throat.
‘In fact, we’ve already interviewed him. He said he saw you going into the church that night.’
‘You’re lying. He wouldn’t.’
‘So you know who I’m talking about?’
Shit.
‘C’mon, John. Don’t suffer that lad any favours. He wouldn’t do the same for you. All you have to do is tell me his name.’
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
‘No can do.’
‘Well, son, if you don’t, I’m going to charge you. It’ll make the papers. You’re a minor, so they mightn’t be able to print the details, but it’s a small village. Everyone will know. You’ll have that on your head for as long as you live in Kilcody.’
He reached for the door.
‘I should call your mother. She’ll want to contact her solicitor. That’ll put a hole in her pocket.’ He shook his head. ‘She’ll be disappointed. She taught you better.’
‘Hang on,’ I said.
He paused, one hand on the door handle. I swallowed sour spit.
‘If I tell you, what happens?’
‘It all depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On what you tell me.’
‘What if I give you a name?’
‘Then I’ll see what I can do.’
I wiped my palms on my shirt.
‘And my mother doesn’t have to know?’
‘You co-operate and I’ll think about it. Your mother doesn’t need this on her head.’
I closed my eyes. I imagined Canavan calling my mother. The look on her face as she held the phone to her ear. A court summons arriving in the post. My mother withdrawing money from her savings account and calling a solicitor.
I felt sick in my heart.
I could’ve told him anything. I could’ve lied through my teeth. Or I could’ve told him what he wanted to know. Everything.
It’s not what goes in your mouth.
‘Jamey Corboy.’
It’s what comes out.
***
In the sluggish, humid weeks that followed, the village seemed unreal, a heat mirage. People moved in slow motion through the market square. Buildings slumped into their foundations as though melted by the heat, and the shadows they cast were crooked and long.